The beginning

We wanted to see the world. On TV you see so many amazing places, cool cities, beautiful nature, inspiring cultures. I wanted to experience it all first hand. I wanted to be affected by something new, something different. Most of all though, I wanted to see the other world, the so called third world, that I have never seen before. I also wanted to be exposed to poverty, simple, rural life, to life on 1 USD a day. I wanted to challenge my social empathy.

The Western world, as people call it, is after all quite similarly sophisticated, tending to merge into one single unit, often mocking each other. Here life is easy, infrastructure is developed, the language barriers are slowly vanishing, nothing is so surprising, so awe-inspiringly different, no experience is life changing. Traveling this part of the world is easy, can be done when one retires. I wanted something different, something rougher, something genuine. So we decided to go to places we probably would not want to go any more (or would not be able to go to) when we are 65. Probably at that age one does not want to sleep in hammocks for weeks, let the ass freeze off at 6000 m altitude, sweat out all body fluids on a jungle trip, be crammed into a 14 seater mininvan as the 20^th person to get from A to B or even go hiking with heavy camping gears. So we wanted to do this stuff now, before we get new jobs, before we have to wait an other 15-20 years to be able to get away with or from the kids, before we would want to spend 100 bucks for a comfortable hotel bed.

So how shall we do it? What route shall we take, which countries? We had only few criteria: the country should be safe, meaning free of large scale violence and should be manageable by independent travelers on a low budget. As it turned out, our other constrain will be British Airways and the whole bunch of its One World buddies, with their hundreds of rules on the round the world plane tickets. Taking their ticket seemed to fit best our rough travel route, traveling west with the good weather through Africa, South America, the Pacific area and Asia. It seemed that no other airline alliance offers this, particularly any trip without touching North American soil. In the end Africa did not fit into the BA schedule either, so we had to get separate tickets for this part of the trip. Talking about roughing it up: it was a real nerve wrecking experience to try to book the ticket with the ignorant BA employees in London. I guess to say that it took 6 months, summarizes the fun enough. During the 410 days abroad and in the so called third world countries, we never had an experience even close to this. We got stuck with the London bunch, because the ticket was the cheapest in Britain. Buying the very same ticket from an other country would have increased the costs by 500-1500 USD.

So our rough plan was the following:

Countries in Africa: the close, travel catalog-listed countries in the North like Egypt, Morocco were off our list. So were countries struggling with violence or disasters, like Sudan and Somalia. What we wanted to do for sure was to see the African wildlife in their natural habitat (with a special emphasis on aardvark) and to get a glimpse at the life of the locals. After some research it seemed that the safest and cheapest way would be to join an organized overlanding trip in East and South Africa. Still now it seems that it was the best choice we could have made. Public transport is close to non existent in many places, particularly to national parks, so one would need to have a private vehicle. But renting a car is not really an option if one wants to cover many countries (not to mention the badly needed mechanics' skills on the horrible roads in Africa) and hiring a cab is just way to expensive and the trustworthiness of the driver is always questionable.

South America: at the beginning we only knew two things: we want to take a boat trip as far up the Amazon as possible and hike in Patagonia. Visiting friends was an extra bonus. Considering that we only planned 3 months for this huge continent, the obvious route was to do an anti-clockwise round trip from Sao Paulo, through the Amazonian jungle to Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile and Argentina.

Oceania: the only good thing about the BA ticket was that it allowed us to stop at Easter Island and French Polynesia. New Zealand and Australia was only meant to be a transit station. Papua New Guinea has always been an exciting travel destination that now seemed to be within reach. But there we again had to buy an additional plane ticket. Fiji sounded fascinating too, but after many conflicting information and long discussions with BA that cost a lot of money, because of course calling their customer service phone number is for an elevated rate, we could not integrate it to our schedule.

Asia: for several reasons Russia was out of question, with that a vast part of the continent. Although India appeared the scariest country of all, that was also the challenge. Would we be able to cope the huge mass of people, the extreme amount of poor, the unique culture and food, the infamous harassment by the locals? We wanted to give it a try.

Thailand was always on the list, mostly because of a good friend living there and not because of the beaches that we skipped completely. Laos and Cambodia seemed still quite rural, (and who would not want to see Angkor?) while Vietnam mostly interested me historically. Indonesia had to be included, so that we could see the Sumatran orang-utan and possibly rhinos or even tigers (the expectation was indeed high considering that the Sumatran rhino and tiger populations are both around 300 and there are as good as no Javan subspecies left). Of course, meeting face to face with a Komodo dragon would be also cool. China fascinated us culturally and the Himalayas attracted us by our goal to go over 7000m above sea level. Pursuing a nomadic life for a while on the Mongolian plains, riding horses or camels, living in yurts...hmmm, who does not dream about that? Japan fascinated Kaarel most of all, because of the high tech stuff.

This was the rough plan before we set out. We did not have much time constrains, other than being eager to continue our scientific career and the 1 year long validity of our round the world BA ticket. So we thought we might spend 3 months in Africa, 3 months in South America, a few weeks in the Pacific region, 1 month in India and China each and a couple of months in the rest of Asia.

Some people ask us if we were not afraid to travel that far for that long. The answer is no, we were not. We had basically nothing to lose. We had no jobs, no property, no responsibilities and no obligations. Well, we also like to think that we are reasonable adults, not reckless teenagers any more, so we trusted our abilities to make appropriate decisions to stay on the safe side. Of course there are a few things one cannot influence, like traffic accidents, earthquakes, floods and epidemics. But these things are so unpredictable and might just as well happen at home (see bird and swine flu threats, the Icelandic volcano eruption etc.), so staying at home to avoid these seems the wrong reason not to go. There were basically only two things that worried me a bit: mosquitoes and the emotional impact of poverty and sickness. The former because of the Dengue fever and malaria, the latter because being helpless is the worst possible situation I can imagine. I would not have known what to do if I saw a dying poor person or a starving child. Or even a sick dog... the latter we saw a lot, the former ones not at all.

Well, this is how our trip begun. We had two backpacks, a plane ticket and only a rough idea of where we go and what we do. During the past year you could witness how it turned out...

Csilla, 2010-09-29